Intel R&D Day Showcases Low Power, ‘People Tech’

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A low-power display technology spearheaded a R&D demonstration by chip giant Intel Corp., which is facing increased pressure to come up with new innovations to outpace its rivals, including Advanced Micro Devices.

On Wednesday, Intel sponsored Intel Research Day, a demonstration event at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The small gathering showed off projects from Intel researchers, which may or may not evolve into commercial products.

One of the fiercest battles in the war between the two microprocessor companies revolves around who can make the most energy-efficient systems.

“Everywhere you look, we’re talking about energy efficiency,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer. “We’re looking at comparing CPU-only power verses total platform power. The average power consumed by the processor is going under one watt but if you look at the rest of the power, we’re still just under 15 watts. The good news is there is a lot of opportunity to get the power out but the bad news is there’s a lot of power there. We’re attacking that vigorously.”

At an analyst event last week, AMD executive Marty Seyer made it clear that they do not intend to let Intel take the lead in the energy conservation race. “We intend to retain this leadership,” he said.

But Intel is stepping up to let it be known that they’re ready to play. One of the technologies showcased on Wednesday is called the Self Refresh Display, that limits power used when machines go idle for even a few seconds. Typically when users read or give presentations and no interaction is happening with the computer, the processor still communicates with the display. With Self Refresh Display, a technology that is still in research phase, the processor is removed from the equation during idle times so that the screen regenerates itself.

“The whole idea is to maintain an appearance that the system is readily available when in fact the system is actually off for substantial portions of the time,” Rattner said. “Giving the illusion of being operational while saving energy is the challenge here.”

A multicore future

In addition to saving power, Intel showcased several projects under the umbrella of what it calls Tera-scale computing. Today, Intel’s fastest chips are the Intel Core Duo with two separate cores, although the company is working hard to bring a four-core chip to market. Intel’s Tera-scale strategy is designed to showcase what will happen in the not-so-distant future when chips will have between tens and hundreds of cores.

Experts were on hand to demonstrate capabilities such as advanced virtual meeting platforms and non-indexed image search in which the machine learns what images are by sight, rather than name and has the ability to search without users having to tag or code.

“This is highly compute-intensive so therefore it is Tera-scale computing but there are far more end-user benefits,” said spokesperson Carole Dulong.

Intel is also putting an impressive amount of resources into ethnographical research this year, or as the company calls it, people-centered innovation. Intel hired a team of social scientists to travel abroad and study the way technology affects various cultures. They hope to use this research to better serve those differing needs rather than simply continuing to produce technology demanded by Western culture and expecting the rest of the world to adapt to it.

“About a year and a half ago, Intel made a commitment to seeing how technologies play into people’s behavior so there was an initiative to hire into the product groups a large number of people who were social scientists and ethnographers,” said Andrew A. Chien, Intel’s director of research. “You can think of it as off-roadmap. Ethnography is an important product in understanding how technology is going to influence people’s lives and be compatible with them.”

Social scientists were on hand to discuss their projects on Wednesday. One in particular, Street Smart Spaces, a collaborative project with Nokia, involves social researchers observing busy streets in three cities: Brighton, in the UK; Xiamen, China; and Florianopolis, Brazil.

“It involves picking one street in each area and exploring how people use that space,” said researcher Kathi Kitner. “We spend 10 days in each place gathering information and cultural artifacts, observing, and doing interviews. We started in January and should wrap up in September. Then we’ll deliver our findings to the company so that we can deliver something that is culturally specific.”

Despite the enthusiasm about Intel’s research and vision for the future, shares of the company dropped for the third consecutive day on Wednesday, closing at $17.39, well below their 52-week low of $17.67. It is no secret that the company is struggling to keep market share from AMD, and in April chief executive officer Paul Otellini, who was not present for Wednesday’s event, called for executives to trim the fat, or “restructure” the company to reduce operating costs by at least $1 billion.

“As Paul has said publicly, the whole company is certainly looking at how we can be more efficient at what we do and how we can restructure to increase efficiency as well,” Rattner said. “It’s really looking at the way we do business. What we’re looking at in terms of research is the pipeline. Are we transferring all the technology that we should from research into products? We still have gaps and obstacles in our way to maximizing efficiency there.”